Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

‘And now,’ Jonas asked when she was done, with the last sliver of olive on his fork, ‘how do you feel about those books now?’

She smiled almost apologetically. ‘Well, obviously I feel differently about them today,’ she said. ‘I find the sombre, rather humourless, view of life which underlies the whole novel hard to take now.’ Ana raised her glass and looked at him, the amethysts in her ears flashing a strange purplish-blue in the glow of the nearby fire. ‘But I won’t let that spoil what they meant to me when I was young,’ she said. ‘The experience of reading a story which told me love is a primal force that breaks all laws.’

He was back on the white sands, slumped in his deckchair under the blue-striped parasol, listening to the roar of the breakers. He raised his eyes to the horizon. Suddenly he saw things more clearly. It all came down to a woman. To his relationship with a woman. It was possibly Ana who had given him the clue. As he lay there in his chair, thinking, he realised that in searching for a unifying theme for a groundbreaking television series, he had also been trying to discover the driving force behind this ambition. And this driving force — he flushed with shame, his cheeks burning even though he was alone, even though it was only a thought — was love. All he wanted, deep down, was to come up with the makings of a work of art which would show Margrete just a fraction of what she had meant to him. It was not a matter of performing some great feat in order to prove himself worthy of her love, as he had once rather childishly imagined; it was a matter of a gift, an unreserved tribute, a way of saying thank you for reawakening a half-dead aspiration and thereby also his neglected creativity. He wanted to show her what she had made of him. ‘Look,’ he wanted to say one day, placing the cassettes containing the programmes before her, ‘I could never have done this without you.’ Yet again, it was her he had been thinking about when he did not know what he was thinking about.

Why did he do it? Where did he get the idea?

Jonas was no longer thinking of nothing. He had come to Montevideo in search of not one viewpoint, but many. He needed to garner different perspectives. He sat in a deckchair, thinking several thoughts at once. First and last and under everything else he was thinking of Margrete, but he also thought about his visit to Oslo Town Hall, about a night when he was taught to think big, when he caught Fridtjof Nansen in the beam of a torch, or Harald Hardråde in a tapestry depicting the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Keeping this thought in mind and, beneath it, the thought of Margrete, he continued also to reflect on his grandmother and the war, her strange, secret insurrection, while at the same pursuing a parallel train of thought along the branch leading to the Town Hall Square and the demonstration staged by The Three Heretics, a demonstration in which he had endeavoured to view a Norwegian phenomenon from the outside, as a foreigner; and this last made him see that he would have to view television in the same way, as if he were a Hindu, an Indian, a film director from Bombay. Jonas Wergeland sat in a deckchair in Montevideo and thought of Margrete and of all those other things and, finally, of his meeting with Ana and how they had got talking merely because he happened to mention the name of a Norwegian writer, and in the midst of this welter of thoughts, in the midst of a scene in which he saw himself sitting in an ever-increasing succession of deckchairs stretching out along the beach, Jonas sensed that he ought to concentrate hardest on that last one, on Sigrid Undset, who could actually be regarded as a word in an international vocabulary. A lot of people in Uruguay had never heard of Norway. But some there knew of Undset. Undset, a Norwegian word you might say, was also a word in Spanish. Instead of saying you came from Norway, you could say you came from Undset.

He had had a sudden, catalytic thought and for one long, intense moment he had the whole of that later so renowned television series clear in his head, in astonishing detail. It all came to him in a flash, unfolding as beautifully as a pack of cards fanning out under a conjuror’s hand. In his mind he pictured himself meeting Ana again as he was packing to leave for home. She would ask: ‘What are you taking with you?’ And he would reply: ‘A bunch of stories.’

It was as simple as that. None of the countless intellectual and, in some cases, extremely sophisticated analyses of Thinking Big can mask the fundamental flash of insight which gave rise to the series, this milestone in television history: in Montevideo, thanks largely to a young woman named Ana, Jonas Wergeland discovered that he wanted to be a storyteller, someone who gathered his people around a gigantic campfire in the shape of millions of switched-on television sets. ‘Look,’ he wanted to say. ‘Listen. Once upon a time there was …’ He would seek out stories, find a couple of dozen Norwegian men and women whose tales were worth telling. And that is what he did. When the series was finally in the can, Jonas Wergeland had not only presented Margrete — in secret — with a gift, he had also erected a public edifice full of frescoes, created an ABC for the nation. He felt genuinely proud and pleased the day he discovered that stills from some of his programmes had been used as illustrations in a school reading book.

Jonas gave himself a push, heaved himself out of the deckchair. The canvas billowed like a sail in the soft breeze. He folded the chair without any bother and carried it back to the hotel. Each step told him that he was a well man. He could tell right away: his lungs felt healed.

The worry about his lungs would resurface one last time, though. In prison. And this time it was really serious. During his first year inside he was constantly aware of an inexplicable pressure inside him, an alarming sensation which tended to intensify just before one of Kamala Varma’s visits. One evening in late winter a tightness localised in his chest area prompted him to strip to the waist and stand in front of the mirror in his cell. For a second he had the distinct impression — although it may have been a trick of the light — that his chest had become transparent, stood revealed as a web of tissue. He caught a glimpse of colourful, glistening, criss-crossing threads: it looked as if he was wearing a filigree waistcoat. The next day he had himself examined by the prison doctor. He could find nothing. ‘Maybe we should get your lungs checked, just to be on the safe side,’ he said and gave Jonas a referral slip. A week later, accompanied by two prison officers, Jonas Wergeland made the journey along slush-covered roads to an X-ray clinic in town.

He realised, as he sat in the waiting room, that he was not at all apprehensive. Instead he felt expectant. Like someone who had spent years at sea and was hoping at long last to sight land. The lady at the reception desk had given him a folder. He sneaked a peek at the form inside, read the words ‘Thorax front and side.’ Had to be something to do with the chest cavity, he guessed.

An assistant in a white coat showed him to a changing cubicle, then to the X-ray room where he was asked to stand with his chest and shoulders pressed against the image plate. He almost felt a little solemn. He thought of the Voyager probes, which were even now zooming out across the cosmos. Among all the information designed to tell extra-terrestrial beings something about the human race was a picture showing an X-ray of a hand — as if to say: we are so clever that we can see through our own bodies. Out of the corner of his eye, Jonas followed the movements behind the screen, in the control room. The radiologist gave him instructions over a loudspeaker, told him how to stand, told him how to breathe. Jonas had no difficulty in holding his breath. He had always been good at holding his breath. Yet again his thoughts returned to life-saving. Or rather, the thought occurred to him that they were going to take photographs of his spirit. And maybe in a way that is what they were doing. What they were actually saying was: ‘Hold your spirit!’